Live At the Britt Festival

After leaving The Monkees, Michael Nesmith spent much of the '70s making cunningly quirky country-rock albums. In the '80s he mostly eschewed music-making for other interests, but when he released 1992's Tropical Campfires—his first album in 13 years—he embarked on a tour whose final date is captured here. The set offers an excellent overview of Nesmith's initial run as a solo artist and marks his last performance with a crucial collaborator, pedal steel guitarist Red Rhodes, who died two months later. Nesmith's often complex, poetic lyrics pretty much guaranteed he'd never achieve the mainstream success of his former band, but the subtle, supple beauty of '70s tunes like "Harmony Constant" and "The Upside of Goodbye" is a rarefied pleasure, especially in a live setting. Of course, a few of Nesmith's more accessible tunes were hits for others ("Different Drum" for Linda Ronstadt and "Some of Shelley's Blues" for The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band); those are here too, alongside some of the less rootsy, rather jazzier tunes that turned up on Tropical Campfires.